Does elitism cause premature convergence in genetic algorithms?
There are many ideas to escape from local optima in GA. One solution is selecting the population for the next iteration based on the probability that is defined based on the individual score. In that case, you have a chance to select a bad score individual to escape from the local optima.
Another efficient solution is playing with the mutation rate to get rid of local optima. In that way, you can increase the rate smoothly, to find a proper rate.